carrara tutorial sale
d-j-o
Posts: 345
With the tutorials on sale, I'm interested in the carrara one, by Phil i believe. I'm really interested in the modeling portion of it. Has any one used the tutorial? Is it a quick run down on how to use, or are there lots of details?
In all I'm pretty good at figuring out software, but not carraras modeling. Which truthfully, i may not even be going into it correctly.
I mentioned in another post I'm an old spline modeler, (AM 95-12) I didnt even know carrara had a spline modeler until i read the tut. topics!
I would say I'm a beginner in carrara modeling but intermediate on posing, shading, average at lighting, would this be a worthwhile tut or can you recommend others for Carrara?
Dan
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The Advanced Carrara Techniques, taught by Phil Wilkes, produced by Infinite Skills, is nice and lengthy, taking through a lot of modeling including the UV Mapping process. He touches on the spline modeler for one of the parts needed to make the airplane, and during that same model he demonstrates using Fenric's ERC for Carrara plugin, which is also quite useful.
Much beyond a quick tutorial, Phil Wilkes explores a lot of very useful things to know about Carrara, making me want the Basic tutorial as well - especially now that there's the 8.5 version touching on the new features.
I still watch the Advanced Techniques set all the time for recaps - he goes through such a wealth of great topics. Using particles, creating shaders, dynamic hair, all manner of things. The basic training one also goes into physics and such - so I still want to get it as I know Phil will not disappoint!
Another great learning tool for me is Essential Training for Carrara 5, by Jack Whitney via Lynda.com
Yes, it's Carrara 5. But he goes into very specific depth on each of Carrara's modelers and goes into great detail many of the functions found in Carrara, and is still very useful for modern Carrara.
I have yet to purchase Mark Bremmer's VTC training, which goes up to Carrara 7 Pro, but he also has an excellent teaching style, and is very thorough.
Thanks, i forgot about Mark Bremmer, i used a few of his tuts when i picked up hexagon and i really liked his style too.
But it looks like I'll pick up Phil's one. Looks like a lot of info.
You'll be glad you did. Like I say, I cannot truly speak for the Basic one yet, even though after seeing the Advanced one that I'm sure it's absolutely wonderful, I do speak very highly for the Advanced training. But just because the Basic one says Basic, I know that it contains a wealth of very needful info!
Thanks, i hope it's not too basic, just detailed.
He is a master, after all! ;)
Unfortunately the spline modeler in Carrara isn't anything we (= as me in AM 96-04) are used to ... if I absolutely have to model a small piece myself, I still go to AM, model, export to obj and do the touch-up in Carrara.
For learning polygon-modelling every free tutorial on the web is sufficient; they differ only on the menu entries and the more or less advanced features. The principles stay the same, and are much to my regret far away from what we learned with AM (remember the slogan: Say no to ... :) )
Polygons!
I've been using hexagon, so have been moving away from Splines, no porcelain material needed!
What is AM? (forgive my tired brain?)
Anyways, the thing I love about these tutorials are the introductions to various features and tools available in the software. The manual is cool - a really great way to learn. I was given the Jack Whitney Essential Training for Carrara 5 Pro, and just love it! He covers all of the different spline modeler functions, Vertex modeler was either new, or drastically updated in version 5 to pretty much what we have today, and he covers all of that, including booleans and such. The metaball modeler too.
But then again, I don't have very many favorites for TV. So I like to watch my educational tutorial videos in place of all that. I agree with JAY_NOLA, when he says that there's nothing like a good book - or rather, collection of good books. I love learning from bound paper. So if I get a good pdf learning tool, I print it out and bind its pages. That can be fun and rewarding too! :)
Now I want to collect up Mark Bremmer's VTC course and Phil's Basic Carrara 8.5 course. It does make for excellent TV!
Animation Master. Man, we use to have to make everything and anything we needed. There was no resources available like Daz. .OBJ items wouldn't import worth using.
Towards the end they started to provide content when we would purchase the newest version. I have a few videos and even a short movie made in it. It's terrible now, and since I have all the audio content still, I've been thinking about redoing it in carrara. I even started the opening scene.
I'll upload (the new start) it in another topic when I get a chance. I generate my movies in still images and need to compile it.
Very cool! Really? Still image animation? That, too, is very cool! Love to see your work!
I think he means image sequences, which is why it would need to be compiled.
After thinking about it, I have no reason why I do it this way. There probably once was a reason. Maybe I had problems editing video files or codecs or something,
Here are some stills, the first are my files and then in vegas it allows me to import them as a single clip which I can edit like a normal video
Since I opened the files it's rendering now.
I think regarding polygon modelling Hexagon isn't so far away from Carrara; from what I've read Hex has some more advanced tools but the principles remain the same.
Was the "porcelain" mat still active in 2012? (Oh, I remember moving one point over hours one mm in y, one in x and and one in z. And starting all over.)
Not that this is any better with polygons in organic models. I wish Carrara had some smoothing tools beside of magnets and sub-d. The free Wings3D has a tool to smooth certain selections = to distribute the polygons in a more even way on a selection of polys, but for these tasks (morphs etc.) Blacksmith 3D is my tool of choice, because it's affordable for a seldom used task. Depends on what you try to do.
(Do you remember in the AM gallery one pic, which remained on the first two pages for years? The nude on the sofa, red wine glass and flower pot in the foreground, with bad lighting - the better lit version didn't go ever online; what had I bought 97 to made the organic shapes of the sofa and the woman look smoother ... now I mostly don't bother anymore with modelling; the stuff sold at DAZ is simply so cheap that it doesn't pay. Sure, way too much models don't follow the rule that every edge on 3d-models of man-made stuff should be bevelled, but there are shaders in Carrara for this. We cope with what we get; something we had to learn as an early 3D-adopter ... :) )
Dartanbeck,
I am having issues with Cararar Pro 8.5 with Genesis and the Parameters thing (and even having some issues with V4 clothing, like where are the morphs!). Even finding and adding the DAZ and Poser Runtimes are a PITA for me.
I have only been using Carrara for importing of and rendering of Wavefront Object models of space ships, etc., but only now because I am trying to move to Carrara from DAZ Studio for the toon rendering I am starting to use Victoria/Michael 4 and Genesis V5/M5 in Carrara.
Anyway, I purchased the Carrara 8.5 Tutorial Video (the basics) and hopefully it is as you imagine, that it will be as good as the advanced version and it will help me out.
I think he means image sequences, which is why it would need to be compiled.
Yes this is what I meant. lol
I wouldn't give up on rendering to image sequences in Carrara. There are some advantages, such as the ability to continue from where you left off should a crash occur or if you have a something like a power outage. There's also some more techy reasons that I'm not qualified to expand on, but I can repeat what I've read. It's easier on the memory, because according to what I've read, Carrara has to open the movie file, write the frame, close it, and do it again on the next frame, etc. etc. etc. That's as far as I can go on that point. ;-)
The nice thing about the image sequences is that if you use .tiff, .png, etc. you can use the alpha channel for later compositing.
I don't remember that image off hand. The image I do remember is a women in a throne room with tigers and drapery.lol
As far as the porcelain I don't remember what version, I used 10 and 11 and barley touched 12. Is this Silvas? Silva?
And Dogwaffle Pro: Howler loads in image sequences exactly the same as an avi, and then can save it out either way as well - allowing you to paint and apply any of its neato features to the entire animation!
I am still stuck in using avi files. I guess I like the neat package, and the ability to quickly check the result in Media Player Classic. I don't use codecs yet - just haven't found one I really like yet. Perhaps I will switch to sequenced images. I'd like to have the ability to store alpha.
Using alphas is maybe comparable to using green screens.
Yeah. And the new Howler allows for alpha video information as selections. This could be a huge boon for me.
The developer of Dogwaffle, Dan Ritchie, made some really cool frame-by-frame animation cartoons. He shows how he did it in some of the Dogwaffle video tutorials. Really sweet!
Dogwaffle caters to those style of animators as well as folks like me, who like to render out video information. Stuff like using sprite sheets and the like. Really neat stuff!
I just like how I can add effects across the whole animation, key framing in changes. I know that many other video processing software does some of this stuff too - I guess I just feel more artistic in Howler. Besides, the software is really awesome and different, the developer and his promotional guru, Philip Staiger, are really cool, and it's unearthly affordable.
I would add a single frame at the beginning and the end of a sequence and drag them over a few seconds and use those stills for my transitions.
If you're using AVI, then you're using a codec. You just don't know what one. ;-) The same with Quicktime.
Using alphas is maybe comparable to using green screens.
Yes and no. A green screen is knocked out and you are left with an empty background. In the old days they used optical printers, now it is computers. The live action is filmed in front of the green screen, but any CGI elements are guaranteed to be rendered with an alpha channel.
True. While the principle is nearly the same, shooting green screen requires that you make true green invisible. Same with blue screen, magic pink, and drop magenta (same as magic pink?), whereas shooting with an alpha channel leaves nothing behind to drop. So you can use any colors you want in the image, even true green, blue and pink.
Not sure what you mean by shooting with an alpha channel. When rendering, yes, when filming real people or objects, there is no alpha channel until you knock out the background which is ideally a uniformly lit blue or green screen.
Back in the day, they used to use blue screens, because the shade of blue they used was nearly invisible to the type of film they used when developed.
Yup. When I said shooting, I meant rendering. Sorry for the confusion.
I hope this wont do Phil Wilkes out on deserved income, but just to let Carrara folks know that SafariBooksOnline is having a Free trial period, then 6 months of access to books and video training at $19 per month - and they have the Carrara training course (videos) availabe there. SO if you hurry, for x days you can access them free of pay 18$ for each month for a while to view them. The number of free days ou get was 15 but is now 10 so seems to be declining - hurry if you want this training free.
I've begun the Advanced Cararra techniques series and the're super! Great work, Phil
https://ssl.safaribooksonline.com/trial
Thanks for all the positive feedback on this thread - I am humbled.
In case you are interested in a subscription option rather than outright purchase, Infinite Skills also have a Unlimited Learning Library that offers not only all of my Carrara titles but a large selection of other 3D related topics that are not listed online, the cost of this is $18 per month by using this URL http://learn.infiniteskills.com/?coupon=learn3 . There is a lot more content here that is aimed towards the 3D Animator. You can also sync your iPad to the account and get access to the working files. On top of all this they've got a huge array of other 3D related content currently in production (including my next title, planned for launch Q2!).
I love PhilW's tutorials on the Ipad. With earphones, I can easily watch them on the train. This subscription is how I have been using the PhilW Carrara tutorials. I didn't realize we could get the working files. Great news. The subscription also gives me access to titles that are more related to my day job, so it is easy to justify the expense.
Can't wait for the new Carrara tutorial.